Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

From:

Stefan Monnier

Subject:

Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

Date:

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 22:24:05 -0500

User-agent:

Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux)

>> > To figure out just what Emacs needs, that's the task I am talking
>> > about.
>> If you want to support things like completions, refactoring, symbol
>> searches, etc., we need full access to the AST from inside Emacs.
> With all due respect, it is so important to avoid the full AST
> that I'm not going to give up on it just because someone claims
> that is necessary.
Give up on what, exactly?
Richard, this is absurd!
I'm convinced there is a misunderstanding.
David wants to write a GCC plugin that outputs the complete AST.
There's absolutely nothing stopping him (or anyone else) doing that
since GCC's current plugin interface does allow for that (and has been
doing so for the last 5 years, apparently).
Are you saying that if David writes this, and writes code for Emacs to
make use of it, you're going to use your leverage to try and make sure
this code doesn't make it into Emacs?
How would the Free Software movement benefit from that?
Stefan